1. The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family by Kerri K. Greenidge (Liveright)

Quaker sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimke are known as abolitionists and advocates for suffrage, but in her revelatory investigation, historian Greenidge uncovers a gnarled family tree, rooted in moral contradiction and generations of trauma. As the sisters agitated for change, they benefited financially from their slaveholding family and tolerated the “sadistic abuse” inflicted by their brother who fathered three sons by a woman he enslaved. Greenidge dug deeply into the archives and learned how this contradiction played out through generations. The Grimkes, Greenidge writes, “is thus a family biography that resonates in the lives of those who struggle with the personal and political consequences of raising children and families in the aftermath of twenty-first-century betrayal of the radical human rights promise of the 1960s.”

2. Down and Out in Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain by Charles Leerhsen (Simon & Schuster)

5Why did magnetic celebrity Bourdain – who vaulted to fame with his best-selling Kitchen Confidential about “twenty-five years of sex, drugs, bad behavior and haute cuisine,” and his hit television shows No Reservations and Parts Unknown – take his own life in a French hotel room? Leerhsen, former Sports Illustrated editor and biographer of Ty Cobb and Butch Cassidy, sets out to answer that question, uncovering Bourdain’s story beginning with his childhood in suburban New Jersey and including his indominable mother, in this unauthorized, highly readable life story, full of eye-popping revelations.

3. The Other Side of Prospect: A Story of Violence, Injustice, and the American City by Nicholas Dawidoff (W. W. Norton)

Bobby, a 16-year-old wrongfully convicted for killing a retired grandfather with a .45 caliber pistol and sentenced to a 38-year prison term, forms the lens through which Dawidoff explores his hometown, New Haven, focusing on Newhallville, once a solid, working-class neighborhood until work went away and it became plagued by gun violence and representative of national inequality. At the tender core of Dawidoff’s remarkable book is his portrait of Bobby, a boy from the “other side” who came of age while incarcerated, and although he was exonerated, he reentered society from prison branded with an invisible “scarlet P.”

4. Vigilance: The Life of William Still, Father of the Underground Railroad by Andrew K. Diemer (Knopf)

In his absorbing biography, Diemer rescues free Black Philadelphian abolitionist William Still from obscurity, tracing his determined, ingenious efforts to help enslaved people find freedom, and finding his own brother from whom he had been separated years before. Still meticulously documented his work and self-published his hefty, detailed magnum opus The Underground Railroad (1872), a chronicle of enslaved people and their escapes from bondage. Diemer enhances his biography of Still by illuminating the fraught Reconstruction era as white resistance grew and tensions smoldered among abolitionists about the best way to achieve equality.

5. A More Just Future: Psychological Tools for Reckoning with Our Past and Driving Social Change by Dolly Chugh (Atria)

The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias put Chugh, an Indian American social psychologist, and New York University professor, on the map. She has followed it up with a very practical book, a kind of guide that wrestles with living with the central American paradox that a country with egalitarian ideals could be built on slavery. Drawing from personal experience as well as new social science discoveries, Chugh writes warmly and sincerely, with an inviting tone, about ways to combat “hindsight bias” by thinking about the past and the future. She encourages individual growth that can lead to necessary systemic change, and points to Germany as a place that has grappled with the Holocaust, while Texas works to erase the past from textbooks.